A news site about animals

For Monkday today, here’s a new fascinating article about the intelligence of monkeys.

“It’s not a question of whether they think — it’s how they think,” says Duke University scientist Brian Hare. Now scientists wonder if apes are capable of thinking about what other apes are thinking. Baboons can distinguish between written words and gibberish. Monkeys seem to be able to do multiplication. Apes can delay instant gratification longer than a human child can. They plan ahead. They make war and peace. They show empathy. They share.

In this photo provided by the Primate Research Institute of Kyoto University, a 5 1/2-year-old chimpanzee named Ayumu performs a memory test with randomly-placed consecutive Arabic numerals, which are later masked, accurately duplicating the lineup on a touch screen computer in Kyoto, Japan. The young chimpanzees in the study titled 'Working memory of numerals in chimpanzees' by Sana Inoue and Tetsuro Matsuzawa could memorize the nine numerals much faster and more accurately than human adults. The evidence that they are more intelligent and social than we thought grows each year, especially when it comes to primates.